The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 8: Say It Out Loud

We didn’t move for a long time.

The orange went out of the sky by degrees, and the light under the trestle turned the color of old pennies. My shoulder had gone from a scream to a low, steady throb, and every breath pulled at something under my ribs. Hale lay a foot away with his arm over his eyes. Neither of us said anything. Down below, the creek went on being the creek.

I had it all. Every piece of it was lined up and ready, and I could feel it sitting behind Rian’s teeth like a swallowed stone.

And it wouldn’t come.

That was the part I hadn’t planned for. I’d thought, somehow, that once I’d decided, the body would just do it. But the second I opened my mouth, Rian’s whole throat clamped shut, like a hand closing around a pipe. My tongue went dead. My face got hot. And underneath it all, in a voice I now recognized as clearly as my own, came the old, practiced line: You didn’t push him. You didn’t do anything. It wasn’t your fault.

Two years of that. It had worn a groove so deep the words slid right into it.

It’s pride, I thought. Not the loud kind. The kind that says if I never say it, it never happened. I knew it well. I’d worn it myself, in a hundred small ways, at a hundred kitchen tables. A man will carry something up a flight of stairs by himself before he’ll ask for a hand.

Say it, I told the body.

Nothing.

Say it. I pushed harder, and the stone in my chest shifted and ground against my ribs, and for a second I thought I was going to be sick. Rian was fighting me. Not hard, not angry. Just terrified, the way you’re terrified of the dentist’s chair, knowing it’ll hurt and knowing it’s coming anyway.

“Marcus,” I said.

It came out cracked.

He didn’t move his arm.

“I need to tell you something, and I need you not to stop me.”

“Then talk.”

I sat up. It took longer than it should have. My hands were shaking, and I pressed them flat against my knees until they stopped, which they mostly did.

“I was on the trestle.” The words dragged. “That day. With Kyle Brandt and Jonah Pike. We were smoking, and we were being stupid, and Theo came down the tracks behind us. He wanted to hang out. And I told him to go home.”

Hale’s arm came down slowly.

“I wasn’t nice about it. He wasn’t doing anything. He was just a kid who wanted to be around. And I said nobody asked, and he said he could cross the rail because you let him, and I...” My voice caught, and I forced it through. “I didn’t say no. I just stood there. I could’ve said no. I could’ve told him it was wet and walked him home. I stood there, and he went out on the rail, and he slipped.”

The word hung in the air between us.

Hale had gone absolutely still. He wasn’t looking at the sky anymore. He was looking at me, and I made myself look back.

“He went in the water, and I didn’t move. I know exactly how long it was, because I’ve counted it every night for two years. It was about four seconds. I could have run to the edge. I could have gone down the bank. I didn’t do any of it. I just stood there, and then Kyle said we had to go, and I went.”

“You ran.”

“We all ran.”

“You ran,” Hale said, and his voice broke in the middle of it.

“Yes.” I didn’t flinch from it. I wanted to. Rian’s body wanted to so badly that my whole spine hurt. “And then three days later a detective came to our house and asked if I’d seen Theo that day, and I said no. I said I’d seen him at lunch, at school, and never after that. He wrote it down. He thanked me. I was fifteen, and I lied to him with a straight face, and I’ve been lying to everybody since.”

I took the sock out of my pocket. My hands hardly worked. I unwrapped it, and the watch lay in my palm, scuffed and old, the leather strap cracked at the holes where a small wrist had pulled it tight.

“It was on the rail. After. When I turned around to leave, it was just lying there. I don’t know why I took it. I’ve asked myself every day.” I held it out. “I think I couldn’t stand the idea of it staying there. Like nobody would ever come for it. And then I couldn’t give it back, because giving it back meant saying where I got it.”

Hale stared at the watch for a long time. He didn’t take it.

“That’s all of it,” I said. “I didn’t push him, and I want to say that because it’s true, but it doesn’t make anything better. It doesn’t. I was there, and I could’ve helped, and I didn’t. And then I let you spend two years thinking you were crazy.” I breathed in. It shook all the way down. “I’m sorry, Marcus. I’m so sorry. I should have said it a long time ago, and I was a coward, and I’m sorry.”

Something let go in my chest.

I didn’t have a better word for it. It was like the moment on a job when a strap you’ve been straining against finally gives and the whole load shifts, and you realize your arms are shaking from how long you’ve held it. The stone dissolved. The groove in Rian’s mind, the old line, went quiet. Something that had been clenched since he was fifteen lay down and was still.

The cold lifted from my hands.

I felt the mark from the stairwell, the little drag under the breastbone, loosen and start to fade.

Hale was crying again. He didn’t try to hide it. His shoulders were going, and the sound he made wasn’t loud, a thin, wrecked sound, like something being let out of a small space. He put the back of his wrist against his mouth.

The creek said what creeks say.

At last he lifted his head. His face was a mess. His eyes, red and swollen, found mine.

“Say it again,” he whispered.

I knew exactly what he meant. I remembered the hallway, the locker, the first morning, the same words from the same voice with something entirely different underneath.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t help him.”

Hale nodded, slowly, as if somebody had handed him a thing that was heavier than he’d expected.

Then he reached out, took the watch out of my hand, and closed his fingers around it.